by Stacia Kane
As she did, the killer swung that arm at her again, hitting her in the back of the head. She ignored it, fought through it.
Thank fuck, the shirt burst into flame, and she scrambled away as the killer roared again and started to beat at its chest with the arm.
Chess gathered her breath. “Take this spirit back to its place of silence!”
The psychopomp obeyed. The killer still waved the arm around, but its eyes—what was left of them—focused on the fire eating its clothing. It didn’t see the psychopomp lunge.
One last howl from the killer, which turned into a squeal as the psychopomp grabbed its soul. The hole in the world behind it rippled again, like water running over glass; the psychopomp leapt through it, dragging the soul in its teeth.
The hole snapped shut, the skull hit the ground and shattered as the body fell on top of it, and Chess sank to her knees in the now-empty circle, wondering what the fuck was going on this time.
The corpse’s ruined head didn’t look any better under the dull glow of the refrigerated warehouse’s fluorescent lights. Its blood had dried a sticky brownish-red; the skin was pale, marked with the tread of Terrible’s boot and various scrapes from hitting the pavement. Even the six Cepts in her system didn’t help it look any better.
Chess held her hand over it for a second. She hadn’t touched the body at all since drawing the passport on it back in the circle. She didn’t particularly want to touch it now, but she had a feeling she was going to have to.
This time she wouldn’t forget her gloves.
Energy slammed into her palm, anyway, thick dark energy that set off a horrible ringing sound in her head, as if her ears had been boxed. Whatever the spell on the body was, it wasn’t pleasant.
But, then, she hadn’t expected it would be.
“What you think, Ladybird?” Bump drawled from behind a fur scarf. “What kinda fuckin witchy shit be this time?”
She hated to admit it in front of him. “I don’t know.”
Silence.
“I can feel the spell, whatever spell it is, and I can feel that it’s male—the spell caster is male, I mean—but I have no idea what the spell is. It feels like ghosts, too.”
“Be him soul inside him fuckin body do the magic, yay? Like him gone an died, then give a fuckin try to coming back.”
“Ghosts can’t cast spells,” she said, only half paying attention. “Do you know who he is? Who the body is, I mean.”
Bump dug something out of one of the pockets in his floor-length white fur coat. “Got us him fuckin wallet here, dig. Be Gordon Samms, it tell. Ain’t knowing him, I ain’t.”
“Had some owes,” Terrible said. He stood at her side with his arm around her shoulders, helping to keep her warm. “Lost he some lashers on the card games, were payin slow.”
Bump’s thin reddish eyebrows rose. “Yay? How much?”
“Six hundred, now. Won heself a game on the other night, paid he a hundred then. At the tables all the time, dig, ain’t could stay away.”
Gambling. That was one thing she’d never seen the point of, one addiction she’d never picked up. Good thing, too. She’d really be broke if she had.
Terrible glanced at her, then back at Bump. “Burnjack say him were yellin when him come onto the street, just jumped him on Yellow Pete, started beatin him.”
“Yellow Pete was the dead guy? The dead guy killed by this one, I mean.”
He nodded. “Were a street dealer, dig, down Seventieth.”
“So why was he near my apartment?”
“Ain’t knowing on that one. Could be him live there, maybe gotta dame there, family, ain’t know.”
Right. It didn’t matter anyway, did it? “Does Burnjack know what the ghost was saying? Did he catch any of it?”
“Asked he on that one, too. Said him only caught a word or two, thinkin be a name. Agneta. Agneta Katina. Be a dame, he said.”
Hmm. “Girlfriend? Wife? Daughter?”
“Naw. Ain’t married. Ain’t sure he likes the dames, dig. Never seen him with any.”
“Oughta give Berta the fuckin ask, yay.” Bump poked at the body with the tip of his cane, for no good reason Chess could fathom. “Do her got one onna street that fuckin name? Maybe her got some fuckin knowledge on it.”
Terrible nodded.
Okay, this wasn’t getting them anywhere. She hated to do it, didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t think she had a choice, either. “I need to get his clothes off.”
Bump snorted. “Ain’t had the thinking you into the fuckin dead ones, Ladybird.”
Chess gave that remark the response it deserved—which was none—and reached for the tattered, singed remnants of the shirt on the body.
Terrible was faster. He always was. “Ain’t you do it, Chess. Lemme, aye?”
His eyes caught hers. Warmth rose in her chest, spread through her whole body. Looking into his eyes—into him—was a high she could never get tired of. Bump disappeared, the mutilated corpse on the table before them disappeared, the icy air around them disappeared. It was just the two of them, standing so close the warmth of his body caressed hers.
She reached up to touch his face, meaning to pull it down to hers so she could kiss him, when Bump cleared his throat. Loudly. The moment ended.
“Thinkin we fuckin get on the move this fuckin night? Maybe you quit on the cuddle-ups, get some attention on the fuckin job, yay?”
Asshole.
Terrible reached out for the buttons on the shirt. And fell.
Chess was already moving when his eyes started to roll back in his head, thrusting her arm in front of him over the body. She couldn’t catch him, couldn’t stop him from falling, but she could at least keep him from face-planting into a corpse.
Or she could quit fucking playing around and figure out a way to make it stop happening. Another good idea might be to get her damn head together; she’d felt the magic, she should have known it would affect him. She’d been so busy getting mushy she hadn’t been focusing, and that was a Bad Thing.
He was out for only a second. That was usually the case when he touched something— Wait. What the fuck?
The body on the table—Gordon Samms’s—was empty. The soul inside it was gone. So there shouldn’t be much for the magic to work on, it shouldn’t still feel as strong as it did. Yes, she should feel it, of course, but not that much. And it shouldn’t be strong enough to do that to Terrible.
Nobody spoke as Terrible stood up. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t need him to. The color rising up his neck, the stiffness of his movements, spoke clearly enough, even if she didn’t already have a pretty good idea what he would say.
“Okay,” she said finally, tossing the word into the silence as if it didn’t matter. “So I’m not just feeling residual magic, I guess. Whatever the spell is, it’s still—there’s still a bag on him or something, there’ll be something there. Bump, you have his wallet, did anyone search his other pockets?”
Bump shook his head. “Figured on letting you have the fuckin job, dig, you the one got the handle on it.”
It was so cool the way he was always thinking of her. She suppressed the eye-roll and dug around in Gordon’s front pockets, stopping at the left one when she pulled out a spell bag about the size of a walnut. Darkness rolled up her arm in waves. Not good; of course it wasn’t, what did she expect?
She set the bag on the table near his feet, to check when they were done, and kept searching. Nothing else. Just the spell.
So why did his body still radiate magic, why did it still make her tattoos itch and sting the way ghosts did?
Terrible started to reach for Gordon’s shirt buttons again, then stopped. “All cool now?”
“No.” Her first instinct was to grab his hand and pull it back, but not only would he really not like that one bit—how childish did she want to make him look? She didn’t see it that way, but she knew he would—but she didn’t want to touch his skin with anything that had touched that spell. Like
her gloves. “There’s something in the body, still.”
His face darkened; he pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, still not meeting her eyes.
For a second she considered asking Bump to help her, but … yeah, like that was going to happen. No, lucky Chess got to strip the corpse all by herself.
Naked, it was even more pitiful—and gross, but she’d expected that.
What she hadn’t expected was the faint teeth marks—dog teeth marks, psychopomp teeth marks—on Gordon’s upper thigh. What she hadn’t expected was the familiar milky-blue cast on his skin, the coloring she hadn’t seen on his face and hands because they were mutilated or dirty.
“Oh fuck.” She jerked back, her hand automatically going to cover her mouth; she caught it just in time. “Shit.”
“What?”
Her stomach roiled and shifted. It didn’t matter, she tried to tell herself. Gordon Samms had to die, she’d had no choice, there’d been nothing else she could do.…
That was Fact, and Truth, and she knew it. But her throat still ached as she forced herself to speak. “He was alive. He— I thought it was a ghost stuffed into his body, that he was dead before he attacked Pete, even, but he wasn’t. He was alive. He was still alive.”
Bump and Terrible watched her: Bump with impatience, Terrible with concern, but neither with understanding. Right, of course they wouldn’t know.
“I killed him,” she said. “My psychopomp killed him. He was alive, and my psychopomp ripped out his soul and killed him.”
She would not throw up. She would not cry, either. She hadn’t had a choice. And, as she recovered from her initial panic, she realized that she really hadn’t had a choice. If he was still alive and moving—or at least, if his soul was still in his body and he was moving, what the fuck—after Terrible crushed his throat and head, then there hadn’t been any other way to kill him, and there hadn’t been any way to subdue him, and she’d done the only thing that could be done save for literally chopping him into pieces while he watched.
That made her feel better. Some. But still … she’d used magic to kill someone. She’d used her psychopomp to kill someone, and that was different from using a real weapon to save her life when she was being attacked. Using magic to commit a murder … that was an automatic death sentence.
Of course, so was killing a psychopomp and carving an illegal sigil into someone’s chest to prevent them from dying, and she’d already done those, so what the hell.
The thought almost made her smile—not quite, but almost. At least it loosened her chest enough for her to take a deep breath.
“You right, Chess?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Um, yeah, I’m okay. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out what’s inside him or whatever.”
Bump raised his eyebrows. “Any fuckin place I gots the thinking of where some shit maybe got stuffed into, I ain’t for fuck wanting get my fuckin look-see in.”
Eeww. She hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, I’m not really, either.”
Terrible shifted his weight beside her, his arm touching hers. “I cut he all open, aye? Straight down, we get a look inside.”
“I’ll check his mouth first,” she said, moving to do exactly that. What there was of his mouth; his teeth wobbled at odd angles—the few still remaining did, though she had no idea how many of them he’d had before Terrible used his skull as a footrest—and beneath the skin his jaw felt like gravel in a sack.
It made her job easier. His lips stretched open wide enough for her to fit her latex-covered hand inside; she wiggled her fingers in his throat, swallowing the sympathy gag threatening to rise in her own. The man was dead, after all. She could shove her hand all the way down into his stomach and he wouldn’t feel it or care.
“I don’t feel anything.” Except tonsils. Ugh.
Terrible pulled out his knife. “Straight down, aye?”
“I guess so.”
The point of the blade slid into Gordon’s flesh and disappeared, moving like a zipper’s tongue from the base of his throat to his groin. Terrible glanced at her. She shook her head.
“Yay, let he have the keeping on he fuckin cock.” Bump grinned. “Ain’t fuckin wanna see that come off nowheres.”
Ah, Bump. Polite as ever.
Silence reigned as Terrible made another cut perpendicular to the first across Gordon’s abdomen. He kept his left hand above the skin, making sure not to touch, but Chess wondered how strongly he felt it, how hard he was fighting against that horrible darkness rising like steam from Gordon’s innards.
He stepped back. “Cool?”
“Yeah, I—yeah.” What was she supposed to do, reach in and start pulling stuff out? Shit, what was she doing, why was she doing this? How the hell had she ended up there, in a freezer, about to shove her hand into a corpse like it was a cereal box and she was looking for a prize?
Did it matter? Addiction led to working for Bump, working for Bump led to falling in love with Terrible, and it would take weeks spent pawing around inside dead bodies to even come close to making her wish she didn’t have him. She guessed all things considered, messing around with body parts was a small price to pay.
That didn’t stop her insides from jerking a warning when her fingers closed around something she was pretty certain was Gordon Samms’s stomach.
“How’s it feelin, Chessie?”
“Really fucking gross,” she managed. “And yeah, still powerful. Can you cut this open?”
That was what did it. When Terrible cut the stomach open so she could see what remained of Gordon’s last meal … she barely made it to the wall before throwing up, humiliated to be doing it in front of Bump, humiliated to be doing it at all, but unable to stop herself.
Terrible’s hand in her hair, gathering it behind her and holding it out of the way. His other hand on her back, rubbing it in slow circles until she finally managed to get herself under control. “ ’Sall cool, baby, aye? No worryin on it, ’sall cool here.”
She started to raise her hands to her streaming eyes and nose but he stopped her, turning her instead to face him while he wiped her face with a rag he’d gotten from somewhere. It was smudged with motor oil on one side but clean elsewhere. Even if it wasn’t, she would have been grateful. “Thanks.”
“Aye.”
Bump nodded when she returned to the table. “Ain’t fuckin put the blame on you, Ladybird. Fuckin sick, yay.”
What? Had Bump—had Bump just been nice to her?
How the hell was she supposed to feel about that? Ugh. Who cared. She had way more important things to worry about.
Like the fact that as the pile of internal organs—ugh, ugh, ugh—grew, she wasn’t finding any other spell bag, no spell ingredients. But everything felt like ghosts and magic, every part of him she touched. As if the spell was part of him. How could that happen?
“Ain’t finding shit, yay, Ladybird?” Bump shook his head. “Got he all fuckin emptied up, what you fuckin do on the now?”
“I don’t know.” She eased the gloves off, trying but failing to keep the blood off her skin. When she got home, she was going to spend an hour or so in a very hot shower, and maybe Terrible could pour bleach over her every couple of minutes. “I don’t know. Let’s see what’s in the spell bag, I guess.”
She slipped on a fresh pair of gloves and jerked the tip of the iron blade she kept in her pick case through the black stitches at the top of the bag.
The rough edges of the fabric fell open, revealing a—well, damn. The spell was about the size of a walnut because it was a walnut—a large one, but a walnut all the same.
She dug the point of her knife into the crack in the shell and pried it open. Blood oozed out. Thick dark blood, so clotted that for a second it looked like some sort of rotted fruit inside the shell.
Her stomach gave another heave, but she ignored it. Not just because she didn’t want to go through that again but because part of her was honestly fascinated. How the hell had he—the same sp
ell caster, the same man—done that? What the hell was that spell?
“Ain’t lookin so fuckin bad.” Bump leaned over the table, peering down. “Fuckin small, yay?”
“But really strong.” Were those clots in the blood, or was something else in there? “Blood … I think it might be corpse blood, like from a murder victim, or maybe menstrual blood. When someone’s using blood like that in a spell, they’re not fucking around.”
Of all the things she could have done without that day, having to say “menstrual” to Bump was—okay, not the biggest or the most important, no, but it was certainly on the list. Not because she was embarrassed; she wasn’t. She just didn’t want to have to discuss anything remotely related to the female reproductive system with him.
Sure enough, he grinned. “Yay, seen me some of that blood fuckin turn dames into—”
“There’s hair in there,” she interrupted, holding one of the hairs up with her gloved index finger and thumb. “See? It’s been tied in knots, too. I wonder if it’s his.”
It probably was. The fingernail clipping she found might have been, too. But the rat’s eye, the three sharply bent pins, the tiny pieces of eggshell and feather, the ball of cobwebs and wax—and were those fish scales?—definitely were not.
By the time she’d finished laying it all out in an orderly if grisly row, her neck ached. As did her head, because she had a pretty good idea what those ingredients were for, what the spell did. “I think that’s it.”
“Aye?” Terrible reached over, offering her a drag off his smoke. She took it. “What’s on with the blood, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s clotted, old, you know?”
“Naw, that ain’t it.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Too thick, leastaways what I’m thinkin. Old blood don’t get … rough like that, dig? Gets thicker, aye, an darker, but not like that.”
Well, she guessed he would know. Yeah, she’d seen lots of spilled blood in her life, but she probably hadn’t paid as much attention to it, had a chance to observe it as time passed, the way he had. “Yeah? You think something’s mixed into it?”
He shrugged. “Ain’t can say on that one. But that ain’t usual blood.”
